Qualcomm unveils the Snapdragon 850, a chip designed for Windows PCs

Boosting the performance of Windows 10 on ARM

Something to look forward to: When Snapdragon 835-powered PCs were announced last December, their all-day battery life impressed many users. But the Always Connected PCs struggle when it comes to emulated x86 performance. Now, Qualcomm has unveiled the Snapdragon 850 Mobile PC Platform, which it says will bring a slew of improvements to the second generation of ARM-powered Windows 10 machines.

Based on the Snapdragon 845 found in most of today’s flagship Android smartphones, the Snapdragon 850 is a dedicated chip for Windows 10 on ARM—it won’t be used in any handsets.

Qualcomm revealed the platform at Computex yesterday. Compared to the Snapdragon 835 PCs, it brings a 30 percent boost in performance, a 20 percent increase in battery life for “multi day” longevity, and 20 percent faster gigabit LTE speeds.

The Snapdragon 850 comes with the same X20 modem as the 845, allowing it to support downlink speeds of 1.2Gbps, and includes the same 10nm Kryo 385 CPU with its eight cores, though they can reach a faster 2.96GHz, as opposed to 2.6GHz. It also comes with the Adreno 630 GPU, bringing features such as 4K video playback and HEVC video encoding of 1080p video up to 120fps.

The chipset features a Hexagon 685 DSP, WiFi that supports 802.11ad Multi-gigabit and integrated 802.11ac 2x2 with MU-MIMO (supporting the 2.4GHz, 5GHz, and 60GHz bands), along with a Spectra 280 Image signal processor for 4K recording at 30fps—the Snapdragon 845 supports 4K@60fps.

“At Samsung, we understand the unique needs of our consumers and aim to create new innovations to support their ‘on-the-go’ lifestyle,” Samsung Electronics executive vice president Kyungsik Choi said, in a statement. “This collaboration with Qualcomm Technologies and their Snapdragon 850 Mobile Compute Platform will allow us to provide always on, always connected mobile computing experiences for our customers.”

Qualcomm said we could expect to see the Snapdragon 850-powered Windows 10 devices hit retail stores in time for the holiday season.